On-line database searching is now a common way of obtaining information. Many search engines such as Yahoo and Google are available for processing user generated queries on various databases. There are several obstacles that can prevent a search engine from providing the most relevant results to the user in a timely manner. For example, result relevance is a highly subjective issue that varies significantly from one user to the next. Two users may type the terms “jaguar belize” with one of those users searching for a jaguar car dealership in Belize and another searching for information about the population of jaguar cats in Belize. If each of these queries is processed identically, one of the users will not be given the results most relevant to him or her, at least not in the highest ranked results.
Another obstacle to providing relevant results is user error. Spelling mistakes and failure to group words into phrases can cause the search engine to search for records that are unrelated to the user's intended query. The user may fail to insert key words into the query that cause the search engine to access a specialized data source that contains very relevant information. The processing of a user's query may be delayed if it is directed to a highly trafficked data source when another source would have sufficed.